anyone know where this was caught?
- Thread starter Knotty Seamen
- Start date
W
wetbeaver
Guest
gotta be the charlottes or Alaska almost looks like the port clamense government wharf in the charlottes.
B
bigguns
Guest
thats a MONSTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!
probably from here
http://www.cpros.com/~woofer/halibut.html
thats gotta be one tough ole girl to cook up
http://www.cpros.com/~woofer/halibut.html
thats gotta be one tough ole girl to cook up
It was caught in Anchorage, Alaska. I saw this when it first was caught. Here is the story.
http://www.adn.com/outdoors/story/3920546p-3942803c.html
http://www.adn.com/outdoors/story/3920546p-3942803c.html
From the Anchorage Daily News;
Sorry, I had to reregister so I cut and pasted the story-pretty neat. You have to register to read it online, otherwise-same picture.
420-pounder could have set record
WHAT RULES? Angler testing homemade lure pulls up a monster halibut.
By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News
Published: September 14, 2003
Last Modified: September 21, 2003 at 12:52 AM
Only in the days after the epic battle was won, with the 420-pound halibut safely weighed, did Tony Davis began to count the ways his place in the record book was lost.
He laughs about it now from his home at the Kitoi Bay Salmon Hatchery on Afognak Island.
It is enough, he said in a telephone interview, to know that the fish he pulled in July from the depths near where Kitoi Bay joins Izhut Bay came within 39 pounds of the world record.
Besides, he added, he is not sure there is much he and friend Nick Bower could have done differently to stay within the rules of the International Game Fish Association -- the prime keeper of big-fish records -- and still get this monster into their 20-foot skiff without hurting themselves.
Well, maybe a few things.
Some of the rules that were broken were, after all, minor infractions, Davis learned later, like sharing the rod and bracing it on the side of the boat at one point for leverage. Others, however, were more significant, like harpooning this whale of a halibut and then shooting it twice with a .44-caliber Magnum handgun to kill it.
"I'm sure that if (the IGFA) saw the video, they'd probably find several other things we did wrong,'' Davis said.
Had Davis known the IGFA rules and followed them, he would have set the 130-pound-line-class record for halibut and recorded the second biggest flatfish since Jack Tragis of Fairbanks pulled the reigning, 459-pound world record from the waters near Dutch Harbor in 1996.
But Davis never looked at the IGFA rules until after that fateful day he and Bower headed out to do some fishing after work.
"I didn't even know what the world record was,'' Davis said.
The Kitoi Bay hatchery worker, who has a night job as owner of Kodiak Custom Fishing Tackle, wanted to test some new lures he had designed. Tackle building and design is something Davis has been doing since he was a kid growing up in Oregon.
"I've always made lures,'' he said. His dad got him started because he was losing so many spinners while fishing. Now he has a cottage business making lures for friends and a handful of tackle shops. It was this business, more than anything else, that lured the 30-year-old angling entrepreneur north to a hatchery job in Prince William Sound in 1997 and then on to Kodiak.
"I realized this is where a guy like me needs to be,'' he said. "If I'm not working, I'm either making tackle or I'm out researching and developing it. That's why I came up here.''
The R&D was under way this particular evening on Kitoi Bay with Bower along in the boat with a video camera to document the results -- if they had results.
"It was just another day at the office,'' Davis said. "It was kind of snotty out there, and you can't film in the rain. But we went anyway."
They were hoping the weather would improve by the time they found the fish. They put their lines down in about 100 feet of water a quarter mile offshore, only about 11/2 miles from the hatchery dock, and started jigging with Davis's new lure.
"Sometimes," he said, "it takes a while to get into the bite.''
Not this time, however.
"I didn't have my line down 10 minutes, and I had Big Bertha on,'' Davis said.
Of course, he didn't know that at first, in part because he didn't expect to find a monster halibut in such relatively shallow water so close to shore. This was not, Davis said, the place he would go looking for a trophy halibut. He was thinking more of finding 15- to 30-pound fish, maybe something bigger.
"It felt like a little chicken halibut nibbling on it,'' he added, "and then I set the hook, and then it was like I hooked the bottom.''
Davis means that literally. The thought that he had hooked something on the bottom is part of the reason he gave the rod over to Bower at one point.
"I traded off with my camera guy in the boat to see if he could do anything, because I couldn't move it,'' Davis said. "It was like hooking into a submarine.''
For some time, the two men weren't sure what was lurking unseen at the end of the line. Davis started thinking he might have hooked into some kelp down deep and the movement he felt was it swaying in the current as the tide changed. Then he and Bower discussed the possibility they might have snagged into a shark.
"I just didn't know what I had,'' Davis said.
Whatever it was, he added, it moved when it wanted to move, and otherwise just seemed to hang on the bottom and ignore the yanking and tugging on the 110-pound-test fishing line. Though Davis was using 110-pound-test line, the nearest, larger, line-class in the IGFA record book is for 130-pound-test line. Davis's fish would have competed in that category where the record is a 242-pound halibut caught near Dutch Harbor in 1999.
That fish was puny compared with the one that locked Davis in a standoff for a long time.
For the first 40 minutes, Davis said, "we thought we were never going to get this thing off the bottom.''
Finally, ready to give up or try anything, the two men fired up the outboard on the skiff, tightened the drag down on the reel as tight as they could, braced the rod against the side of the boat, and began trying to tow the fish off the bottom.
Fighting the fish with the boat is a major violation of IGFA rules, but it is what finally enabled Davis and Bower to move this halibut.
Once they got the fish off the bottom and moving, Davis added, the struggle didn't last much longer, maybe 10 or 15 minutes, but then other problems arose.
"When he did come up, he was quite a ways behind the skiff,'' Davis said. "He looked like a whale back there.
"We thought, 'Oh man, how are we going to get that thing in the boat?' We thought about letting him go, but that (lure had) the only one of those jig skirts I had. It was just sent to me by a manufacturer I've been working with. I didn't want to lose that.''
The two men discussed what to do, and quickly decided they weren't getting the fish in the boat.
"That fish weighed more than Nick and I, the only two guys in the boat, and it was half as long as the boat we were in,'' Davis said. "We were in a 20-foot aluminum skiff and the fish was 91 inches (just shy of 8 feet) long. It was almost as long and wide as a sheet of plywood.
"I knew we were in all kinds of trouble.
"A fish that big, even if you could get it in the boat, it would bust the bottom out and sink you.''
So they decided they would try to harpoon the halibut and tow it back to the hatchery. Only by this time, they had worn the fish to exhaustion, so instead of swimming beside the boat, it hung down like dead weight on Davis' line.
"He was straight up and down,'' Davis said, which made it impossible to drive a harpoon through the halibut's head.
"At that point,'' Davis said, "I thought we were still going to lose him. I thought for sure I was going to break him off.''
He had the drag on his reel cranked down as tight as he could get it and was only hoping the braided Dacron "Tuf-Line" would hold. To get the fish up into position so they could harpoon it, the men again began towing.
With the tow, Davis said, the big halibut came up on a plane just like a sheet of plywood, and they drove the harpoon home, tied the line attached to it off on the stern of the skiff and started for the hatchery.
"We had to tow him about a mile and a half,'' Davis said. "Every once in a while, he'd go crazy and pull the boat around.''
At the dock, they shot the fish twice to kill it -- another big IGFA rule violation -- and then hoisted it out of the water with a crane. Davis, who has consulted the IGFA rule book since making his catch, believes this is another rule violation. Apparently, he said, anglers are required to land the fish themselves -- not pull them out of the water with heavy equipment even if the latter seems appropriate.
He's still a little unsure, however, of how one lands a fish like this without heavy equipment. A 400-pound halibut, he said, is so big it would even be hard for two men to pull it up on a beach.
Processing a fish like this, he added, is its own ordeal.
"It was a good couple hour deal butchering him up,'' Davis said. "It was kind of like eating an elephant; you just had to keep working at it.
"You've got a filet a foot thick. ... You can't flip it over. It was a lot of work.
"I'm glad I got one of that size, but I really don't want to do it again. It's really overwhelming to deal with a fish like that."
Overwhelming, but still the thrill of a lifetime.
Davis noted that he might not have any records for this fish, but "I've got bragging rights.''
Daily News Outdoor editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com of 257-4588.
Sorry, I had to reregister so I cut and pasted the story-pretty neat. You have to register to read it online, otherwise-same picture.
420-pounder could have set record
WHAT RULES? Angler testing homemade lure pulls up a monster halibut.
By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News
Published: September 14, 2003
Last Modified: September 21, 2003 at 12:52 AM
Only in the days after the epic battle was won, with the 420-pound halibut safely weighed, did Tony Davis began to count the ways his place in the record book was lost.
He laughs about it now from his home at the Kitoi Bay Salmon Hatchery on Afognak Island.
It is enough, he said in a telephone interview, to know that the fish he pulled in July from the depths near where Kitoi Bay joins Izhut Bay came within 39 pounds of the world record.
Besides, he added, he is not sure there is much he and friend Nick Bower could have done differently to stay within the rules of the International Game Fish Association -- the prime keeper of big-fish records -- and still get this monster into their 20-foot skiff without hurting themselves.
Well, maybe a few things.
Some of the rules that were broken were, after all, minor infractions, Davis learned later, like sharing the rod and bracing it on the side of the boat at one point for leverage. Others, however, were more significant, like harpooning this whale of a halibut and then shooting it twice with a .44-caliber Magnum handgun to kill it.
"I'm sure that if (the IGFA) saw the video, they'd probably find several other things we did wrong,'' Davis said.
Had Davis known the IGFA rules and followed them, he would have set the 130-pound-line-class record for halibut and recorded the second biggest flatfish since Jack Tragis of Fairbanks pulled the reigning, 459-pound world record from the waters near Dutch Harbor in 1996.
But Davis never looked at the IGFA rules until after that fateful day he and Bower headed out to do some fishing after work.
"I didn't even know what the world record was,'' Davis said.
The Kitoi Bay hatchery worker, who has a night job as owner of Kodiak Custom Fishing Tackle, wanted to test some new lures he had designed. Tackle building and design is something Davis has been doing since he was a kid growing up in Oregon.
"I've always made lures,'' he said. His dad got him started because he was losing so many spinners while fishing. Now he has a cottage business making lures for friends and a handful of tackle shops. It was this business, more than anything else, that lured the 30-year-old angling entrepreneur north to a hatchery job in Prince William Sound in 1997 and then on to Kodiak.
"I realized this is where a guy like me needs to be,'' he said. "If I'm not working, I'm either making tackle or I'm out researching and developing it. That's why I came up here.''
The R&D was under way this particular evening on Kitoi Bay with Bower along in the boat with a video camera to document the results -- if they had results.
"It was just another day at the office,'' Davis said. "It was kind of snotty out there, and you can't film in the rain. But we went anyway."
They were hoping the weather would improve by the time they found the fish. They put their lines down in about 100 feet of water a quarter mile offshore, only about 11/2 miles from the hatchery dock, and started jigging with Davis's new lure.
"Sometimes," he said, "it takes a while to get into the bite.''
Not this time, however.
"I didn't have my line down 10 minutes, and I had Big Bertha on,'' Davis said.
Of course, he didn't know that at first, in part because he didn't expect to find a monster halibut in such relatively shallow water so close to shore. This was not, Davis said, the place he would go looking for a trophy halibut. He was thinking more of finding 15- to 30-pound fish, maybe something bigger.
"It felt like a little chicken halibut nibbling on it,'' he added, "and then I set the hook, and then it was like I hooked the bottom.''
Davis means that literally. The thought that he had hooked something on the bottom is part of the reason he gave the rod over to Bower at one point.
"I traded off with my camera guy in the boat to see if he could do anything, because I couldn't move it,'' Davis said. "It was like hooking into a submarine.''
For some time, the two men weren't sure what was lurking unseen at the end of the line. Davis started thinking he might have hooked into some kelp down deep and the movement he felt was it swaying in the current as the tide changed. Then he and Bower discussed the possibility they might have snagged into a shark.
"I just didn't know what I had,'' Davis said.
Whatever it was, he added, it moved when it wanted to move, and otherwise just seemed to hang on the bottom and ignore the yanking and tugging on the 110-pound-test fishing line. Though Davis was using 110-pound-test line, the nearest, larger, line-class in the IGFA record book is for 130-pound-test line. Davis's fish would have competed in that category where the record is a 242-pound halibut caught near Dutch Harbor in 1999.
That fish was puny compared with the one that locked Davis in a standoff for a long time.
For the first 40 minutes, Davis said, "we thought we were never going to get this thing off the bottom.''
Finally, ready to give up or try anything, the two men fired up the outboard on the skiff, tightened the drag down on the reel as tight as they could, braced the rod against the side of the boat, and began trying to tow the fish off the bottom.
Fighting the fish with the boat is a major violation of IGFA rules, but it is what finally enabled Davis and Bower to move this halibut.
Once they got the fish off the bottom and moving, Davis added, the struggle didn't last much longer, maybe 10 or 15 minutes, but then other problems arose.
"When he did come up, he was quite a ways behind the skiff,'' Davis said. "He looked like a whale back there.
"We thought, 'Oh man, how are we going to get that thing in the boat?' We thought about letting him go, but that (lure had) the only one of those jig skirts I had. It was just sent to me by a manufacturer I've been working with. I didn't want to lose that.''
The two men discussed what to do, and quickly decided they weren't getting the fish in the boat.
"That fish weighed more than Nick and I, the only two guys in the boat, and it was half as long as the boat we were in,'' Davis said. "We were in a 20-foot aluminum skiff and the fish was 91 inches (just shy of 8 feet) long. It was almost as long and wide as a sheet of plywood.
"I knew we were in all kinds of trouble.
"A fish that big, even if you could get it in the boat, it would bust the bottom out and sink you.''
So they decided they would try to harpoon the halibut and tow it back to the hatchery. Only by this time, they had worn the fish to exhaustion, so instead of swimming beside the boat, it hung down like dead weight on Davis' line.
"He was straight up and down,'' Davis said, which made it impossible to drive a harpoon through the halibut's head.
"At that point,'' Davis said, "I thought we were still going to lose him. I thought for sure I was going to break him off.''
He had the drag on his reel cranked down as tight as he could get it and was only hoping the braided Dacron "Tuf-Line" would hold. To get the fish up into position so they could harpoon it, the men again began towing.
With the tow, Davis said, the big halibut came up on a plane just like a sheet of plywood, and they drove the harpoon home, tied the line attached to it off on the stern of the skiff and started for the hatchery.
"We had to tow him about a mile and a half,'' Davis said. "Every once in a while, he'd go crazy and pull the boat around.''
At the dock, they shot the fish twice to kill it -- another big IGFA rule violation -- and then hoisted it out of the water with a crane. Davis, who has consulted the IGFA rule book since making his catch, believes this is another rule violation. Apparently, he said, anglers are required to land the fish themselves -- not pull them out of the water with heavy equipment even if the latter seems appropriate.
He's still a little unsure, however, of how one lands a fish like this without heavy equipment. A 400-pound halibut, he said, is so big it would even be hard for two men to pull it up on a beach.
Processing a fish like this, he added, is its own ordeal.
"It was a good couple hour deal butchering him up,'' Davis said. "It was kind of like eating an elephant; you just had to keep working at it.
"You've got a filet a foot thick. ... You can't flip it over. It was a lot of work.
"I'm glad I got one of that size, but I really don't want to do it again. It's really overwhelming to deal with a fish like that."
Overwhelming, but still the thrill of a lifetime.
Davis noted that he might not have any records for this fish, but "I've got bragging rights.''
Daily News Outdoor editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com of 257-4588.
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